Who Was Ellen G. White?

Born Ellen Harmon in Gorham, Maine, in 1827, she was seriously injured as a child and unable to continue formal schooling beyond the third grade. Her family were earnest Methodists caught up in the Millerite revival; she experienced the disappointment of 1844 at seventeen. In December of that year she reported the first of many visions, and at nineteen she married James White, a young Adventist minister. Together with Joseph Bates and others, they helped organize what became the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Over seventy years of ministry she wrote more than 5,000 periodical articles and dozens of books, including Steps to Christ, The Desire of Ages, The Great Controversy and Patriarchs and Prophets. Steps to Christ has been translated into more than 160 languages. She traveled and labored in the United States, Europe and Australia, and was instrumental in founding Adventist schools, publishing houses and sanitariums.

She described her role as that of a messenger, and consistently directed people to the Bible as the standard: "The Bible, and the Bible alone, is to be our creed" — a principle she urged repeatedly. She never claimed infallibility, never asked for her writings to be added to the canon, and wrote that if her words were followed it should be because they agreed with Scripture and common sense, not because of her authority.

Because this site is written from the historic Adventist perspective, Ellen White is part of the story — and we state that openly rather than hiding it. At the same time, the studies in this library are built on Scripture and documented history, not on her authority. Where her writings are relevant they are identified as supporting material, never as the foundation of an argument.